MBiz

25 MBiz | november 2015 2016 is my official year to put on my big girl pants and learn how to sell. i'm aiming for our first $1-million year." Colleen dyck started making her own high-quality energy bars when she was training for a triathlon. gorP bars are now sold coast to coast. Photos by Darcy Finley The GORP energy bar is growing in popularity, with plans for export into the U.S. and an opportunity to enter the Austrian market. Mountain Equipment Co-op sells the bars nationally coast to coast, and both the North West Company and DOMO Gasoline are on board. "I can't tell you how many times someone has come up to me and said, 'The young kid in DOMO is totally selling your bars,' " she says. Dyck was born in Renfrew, Ont., and grew up in Mississauga until junior high, when her parents moved 'back home' to Niverville. Later, Dyck studied entrepreneurship at Red River College, following a natural life-long inclination. "When I was a kid, I would go door to door selling whatever I could make." After working several jobs, she left a highly paid position at StandardAero and went to Mountain Equipment Co- op, having decided to just surround herself with the things she loved to do and see what would happen. She began using energy bars herself when she started training for triathlons. "What I found on the market was just gross," she says. "Back then, it was a lot of high fructose corn syrup, a lot of nasty aftertaste, a lot of really bad ingredients, and not a lot of good ingredients — which was the more disconcerting thing," she says. She developed her own bars at home and soon had demand from other athletes. She took her recipe to the Food Development Centre, and that's where she hit her first hurdle: Her product was too expensive to make. But she insisted on keeping the more expensive protein, which doesn't cause bloat, and the full amount of flax and hemp in order to provide both satisfaction and functional benefits. "I took a bit of a formulation risk and I said, 'No, we're sticking to our guns,' " she says. "I guess that's been the story of the company ever since — refusing to give in on what's been conventionally done in terms of business practices as far as meeting certain costing standards." On her first attempt to work with a professional marketing firm, Dyck hit another snag. "So much of their strategy seemed to be around trickery and, 'How can we get more people to eat more bars per day?' " The whole approach was just wrong. She was trying to promote something that fit into an overall healthy lifestyle. She left the company. "That was one of the first times I learned that the gut is worth something," she says. "There are things in you that you need to listen to, and it won't always make sense, but you have to do it because if you're not 100% behind what you're doing, it's going to come out in the wash." The company based at her and husband Grant's family farm is now sponsoring some professional athletes and has started the 'Not So Plain Jane and Not So Average Joe' campaign, where everyday folks, nominated through the website, are sponsored on their own journey into fitness. Dyck wants to keep the momentum going. "2016 is my official year to put on my big girl pants and learn how to sell," she says. "I'm aiming for our first $1-million year." Currently, the company has four full-time employees, with 15 to 19 casual workers who come in on production days. Dyck is passionate about the rural economy and about providing employment right here at home. She points out that one in four Manitoba jobs depend on agriculture. "We grow gold and then we ship it other places to have the value added," she says. "I just think we grow such amazing crops here and it's such a big part of our economy that we have to keep the processing here, too." Learn more at gorpworld.com. ■

• Cover